A renovation at Sleepy Hollow pays homage to its original designer, Charles Blair Macdonald, and brings a storied New York course into the modern era

George Sanossian had more than just a round of golf on his mind as he and Greg Hurd prepared to
hit their opening tee shots at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club. Sanossian, the club's greens
committee chairman, knew that the grand old Westchester County, New York, layout, designed nearly
a century ago by the first true American golf course architect, Charles Blair Macdonald, had
started to become a bit frayed and outdated in recent years. And he knew that some of the club's
board members had been clamoring for renovations to make the course more challenging in the wake
of technological changes that had been sweeping through the sport in recent decades. So Sanossian
turned to Hurd, the head pro at the North Hempstead Country Club on Long Island who had once
worked at Sleepy Hollow, and solicited his input about the issue.

"I asked him what the impact technology had on the game as we were teeing off on No. 1," says
Sanossian. "When he got to his ball, he says, 'I'll give you the impact of technology. I'm 50
years old now. When I was 30 years old I could hit my best drive on this hole and it would have
been 30 yards behind where it is today.' We realized technology had shortened Sleepy Hollow and we
wanted to restore some teeth."

While the course had long enjoyed its status as player-friendly with its moderate length and
abidingly wide fairways, the encroachment of trees and member unhappiness with a bunker project in
the early 1990s had begun to give cause for thought to those charged with the club's future. Now,
so had the technology issue. While not long at 6,570 yards from the tips at par 70, Sleepy
Hollow's strength had always been in its par 4s. But now the 448-yard 8th, the 462-yard 12th and
the uphill 405-yard 18th were no longer quite so daunting.

Ultimately, Sanossian was asked to oversee a significant renovation effort. Several years
later, the resulting changes have toughened up the course and propelled it into the twenty-first
century, while still keeping Sleepy Hollow enjoyable for the majority of players who played from
the members' tees. The revisions have also cast the course in the mold of what Macdonald might
have originally intended. A course, says Gil Hanse, the architect who directed the project, that
has been "sympathetically restored."

Across America grand old clubs are undergoing the sometimes agonizing process of bringing their
courses up to date. Shrinking greens, collapsing bunkers, spreading trees and rapidly evolving
golf club and ball technology are the most frequently cited reasons that a club undertakes a
renovation project. The technology question is often paramount in discussions about what to do
with classic courses. A wonderful test of golf designed in the 1920s at 6,600 yards is rendered
not much more than a pitch and putt when decent amateur players can drive the ball 275 yards.
Blunderbuss drivers and perfect-pitch golf balls are turning a heavyweight 450-yard par 4 into a
jab-and-juke welterweight.

A prime example would be the Merion Golf Club near Philadelphia, a longtime host to U.S. Opens
and other USGA events. The Merion East Course was only 6,544 yards at par 70 when David Graham won
the 1981 Open there with a score of 7-under par. At that time, Graham was hitting a
persimmon-headed driver. In the modern era of golf driven by technology, Merion East was driven
off the Open rota. But renovation work at the start of the twenty-first century added some 400
yards to the course, and that, along with its small, old-fashioned greens, has convinced the USGA
to bring the Open back to Merion in 2013.

Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, is an entirely different animal, one driven by
the hunger to challenge the best players in the world. Under the direction of Tom Fazio, the
course has been lengthened over the past decade by 600 yards and trees have been planted to
squeeze down some driving areas. And Rees Jones has brought change to many old U.S. Open courses
such as Oakland Hills, the Black Course at Bethpage State Park and the Country Club of
Brookline.

Like these other vaunted courses, Sleepy Hollow appeared ready for a modern makeover. The club
dated back to the early twentieth century, when men of great wealth and social stature, led by
William Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor IV, contemplated a golf club on
land overlooking the Hudson River. Rockefeller and an international banker named Frank A.
Vanderlip bought an estate of pronounced grandeur in a town made famous by Washington Irving and
his short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The estate, purchased in 1910, had been owned by
Margaret Louisa Shepard, a granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt and the widow of Col. Elliott
Fitch Shepard, a lawyer who founded the New York State Bar Association. The colonel, who had
bought the property in the late nineteenth century, had commissioned iconic architect Stanford
White to design his immense manor home, which was surrounded by hundreds of acres that overlooked
the river and its magnificent palisades. In the minds of the founders, the manor home would make a
grand clubhouse and the grounds a grand golf course.

For most of the twentieth century, the layout delivered by Macdonald and his right-hand man,
Seth Raynor, in 1911 (apparently with acrimony and dispute with Mr. Rockefeller), did just that,
maintaining its status as one of the most majestic courses in America. But the bunkering and tree
concerns, as well as the technology issues that had effectively shortened the course, had become
the focus of the board members and committeemen, who felt that a renovation was necessary. And it
wasn't only the golf course at Sleepy Hollow that required attention; the clubhouse, tennis
courts, pool and shooting facility also needed to be maintained. For Mike Hegarty, the turn of a
new century was the appropriate time to consider a wide-ranging plan for capital investment. As a
club vice president (he was newly elected as president at the beginning of 2007), Hegarty, along
with his peers, felt that the wonderful old golf course wasn't as grand as it once was. "We took
the point of view, as trustees of the club we were guardians of the current member experience and
also guardians of future member experiences," says Hegarty. "We decided the golf course is the
engine that drives the club. It's the primary reason people join the club. We thought we needed to
protect the major engine of the club."

But how to do it? What direction to go in? Where would this all lead?

It led to the doorstep of George Sanossian, the greens committee chairman, in 2004. Sanossian,
an accountant by profession and thus particular by nature, was charged with assessing the capital
needs of the golf course, and those needs would be directly impacted by any decision that would
lead to a course renovation. There was a course renovation plan in place, but neither Sanossian
nor his committeemen felt that it should be implemented because it "[would have taken] us further
away from our classical design heritage, further away from the design concepts of Macdonald," says
Sanossian. So they would start from scratch.

"This is a project I didn't campaign for, didn't bark about the need to do it," says Sanossian.
"It was a project laid at my feet. Myself and Phil Cuthbertson [a committeeman] said if we were
identified with the implementation of that [old] plan, we would have to look for a new place to
play golf."

Instead, they looked for a new direction for the golf course. And for that, they looked
backwards. Macdonald was the original designer, but the course had been altered in the 1920s when
some valuable land containing four of the original holes was sold. While there is no written
record, it is believed that local architect Tom Winton may have designed four new holes. In 1930,
the club decided to expanded to 27 holes and brought in A. W. Tillinghast, whose reputation was
burgeoning after designing such well-regarded championship tracts as Winged Foot and Baltusrol.
Tillinghast designed the nine new holes and may have altered some of Macdonald's original holes.
To a far lesser extent Robert Trent Jones and subsequently his son Rees did work on the
course.

But it was Macdonald's name that rang true, inside the club and out. "It quickly became
apparent speaking to outsiders who were able to discern the forest from the trees that our
perception of the course as a Macdonald course was correct," says Sanossian. "We were a Macdonald
course with a strong Tillinghast influence, but people from the outside said we were a Macdonald
course. So we said, Let's follow the Macdonald genre and do things the way Macdonald would have
done them."

Sleepy Hollow was going to update itself by backdating itself.

Therein lies the rub. There was no history as to how Macdonald had done things at Sleepy
Hollow. There was no written word or course layout or photographic evidence. And part of the club
lore was that Macdonald and Rockefeller had a falling outÑaccording to Macdonald, Rockefeller did
not want any trees cut down and removed. As a result Macdonald had little to do with the project
once he and Raynor had completed the initial routing, instead handing most of the implementation
work to his associate. So now what?

Sanossian knew that Macdonald's courses were characterized by features taken from the great
courses of Scotland, particularly the Old Course at St Andrews. Macdonald employed penal strategic
bunkering with large features, but also provided a way to get around those nasty pits safely. To
get a firsthand look at his work, Sanossian, greens committee members and the course
superintendent, Tom Leahy, decided to visit the prime examples of Macdonald's work in the New York
area. In the fall of 2004, they went to look at National Golf Links in Southampton, New York,
considered the first true championship course built in America. The following spring, they visited
the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York. And a year later they visited the Yale University
course in New Haven, Connecticut, which made a stunning impact. "At Yale, the scale is immense,"
says Sanossian. "The bunkers are immense, the greens are immense, the property is huge. It's like
a golf course on steroids."

At the time, Gil Hanse was under consideration for doing the work at Sleepy Hollow, and before
Sanossian and his crew checked out the Yale course, Hanse had provided insights to the group about
what attributes of the Yale course he felt merited particular scrutiny. While he didn't carry the
cachet of a Tom Fazio, or of the brothers Rees and Robert Trent Jones Jr., or of a Pete Dye, Hanse
did have a portfolio of work that was highly regarded, and he enjoyed a reputation as a hands-on
architect and an easy person to work with. Although the greens committee met with two other
architects, in the end Hanse was the hands-down choice for the job. But Hanse said that he would
do the work only if his good friend George Bahto had significant input.

Bahto was a devout student and historian of Macdonald and had written a book about him, The
Evangelist of Golf. There wasn't any detail of Macdonald's work that Bahto wasn't intimately
familiar with, earning him the nickname Old MacBahto. In writing his book about Macdonald, Bahto
had visited Sleepy Hollow on several occasions. "I just knew there wasn't enough of him there," he
says.

Despite Bahto's extensive knowledge of Macdonald's work, Sleepy Hollow was initially reticent
about hiring him as a consultant on the renovation project. "The members of the club who thought
that the appropriate way to go was Macdonald and Raynor realized that George was the foremost
expert on those two gentlemen, but his architectural experience might have made it more difficult
to convince the membership," says Hanse. "They probably thought they needed to bring in someone
who had more of a résumé in architecture. I said because of my friendship with George, I will be
happy to be involved as long as George was involved in a big way. We needed George because it was
the right thing to do because of his knowledge, and because of our workload [at Hanse Design] we
needed someone to shoulder the construction supervision."

After Hanse's renovation plans were approved by the greens committee and then by the Sleepy
Hollow board, the board members felt it was important to gauge the feelings of the membership. Two
club meetings were organized, Hanse's plans were presented, and there would be debate. But there
wouldn't be a vote. "I think if the membership had blown back with such ferociousness that it was
clear that the board and the green[s] committee were not seeing what the membership saw, I think
it would have been reconsidered," says Sanossian. "The board had a mind-set that [the] plan should
be approved, but we wanted member buy-in."

There were many questions, but nothing approaching a revolt. Tom Wright, a member for 20 years,
was, like his peers, concerned about the tree removal plan. "My fundamental concern had to do with
the pragmatic view that it takes 75 years to replace a tree of the size and character that we had
at Sleepy Hollow," says Wright. "Each tree had to be taken very seriously."

But that wasn't the only thing that concerned Wright. "This notion of returning it to its C. B.
Macdonald roots is somewhat troubling to me because it's impossible to know what Mr. Macdonald
intended," notes Wright. "Did he not think trees would grow over 50 years when he thought about
Sleepy Hollow as opposed to his property at the National Golf Links? That always concerned me,
putting yourself in the head of C. B. Macdonald."

And as for making the course more challenging, Wright wasn't all that sure. "The course is very
broadly viewed as fun to play," he says. "You could debate how challenging it is for the best
golfers. I don't hear any debate on how challenging it is for the average golfer."

For Brendan O'Rourke, another 20-year member, large-scale change didn't seem at all necessary.
"I personally didn't understand the mandate for a drastic change," says O'Rourke. "I felt if we
lengthened some tees and fixed some traps, we had a spectacular course."

The plan didn't call for lengthening the course by much and was always mindful of the average
player. Hanse's directive was that the toughening of the course would impact the better players
who chose to play from the back tees while keeping it enjoyable for the majority of players who
played from the members' tees. The major strategic element proposed by Hanse and Bahto was the
introduction of severe fairway bunkering in the style of Macdonald and Raynor. Sleepy Hollow had a
few fairway bunkers, but players could bomb away off the tees without regard to placement as long
as the shots weren't wild enough to end up in the trees. And there would be a new hole, a par-5
12th replacing a long, difficult par 4. In creating a new par 5, the old par-5 15th would be
shortened and reduced to a par 4, which is actually how Macdonald had designed the original
hole.

"One of the things we thought was that our closing holes should be strong, and 15 was weak as a
par 5," says Sanossian. "Macdonald, when he designed punch bowl greens, they were at the end of
par 4s, two-shot holes. We wanted to align the 14th green with the 15th tee so you didn't walk 75
yards back up the hill to the 15th tee."

Without any significant member objections, the project got under way in the summer of 2006.
Sleepy Hollow is divided into two courses, the 18-hole Upper and the nine-hole Lower. Work had
begun on the Lower Course in the spring of 2006, which allowed the membership to see a model of
what was to come on the Upper Course. Using a local contractor, Hawkshaw Golf Course Construction,
that Hanse had worked with before, construction proceeded on couples of holes at a time. That had
a twofold benefit. One, it meant that play was not disrupted substantially, and two, the members
could see what would be happening, on a larger scale, on the Upper Course. "If we had given it to
them all at once, it would have been too much to handle," says Bahto. "By doing the Lower first,
it allowed the members to get used to the style, to make comments on it, and that made it easier
to do what we wanted to do with the Upper."

What they would do to the Upper was to follow the strategies that Macdonald employed, the
strategies he took directly from his visits to Scotland. "What Macdonald was saying is that if you
challenge my hazard successfully off the tee, there will be a reward," says Bahto. "Or you can go
around it, but it will be a longer hole with a more difficult approach. At Sleepy there were no
strategies off the tee and probably never were. Lacking those Macdonald strategies off [the tee],
the course was schizophrenic and lacked identity."

The introduction of significant, severe and identifiable fairway bunkering was crucial. These
were sand pits with steep grass faces that would put a penalty on a drive, that would make a good
player think about the consequences of a mediocre shot. One of the new bunkers thrusts itself into
play on the left side of the par-4 second, another menaces the right side of the par-4 fourth,
another pops out from the left on the 13th and still others come from both the left and right on
the 14th.

Some of the new bunkers are blind off the tee, an old-world way to create a hazard. On one hand
you could criticize a blind bunker as being unfair, but as Ben Hogan once said, "A blind shot is
blind only once."

The steep grass-face style of the new bunkering has a practical maintenance purpose. In heavy
rainstorms, bunkers with steep sand flashing tend to wash out, as several did at Sleepy Hollow. A
bunker renovation at the Country Club of Birmingham wasn't mindful of the Alabama climate and its
propensity for gullywashers. The steep sand faces kept washing out, necessitating another project
to rebuild the bunkers with steep grass faces.

While Sleepy's new fairway bunkers were being added, all the greenside bunkers were being
recast, most significantly at the second hole, the 13th and the dramatic short 16th. At the second
a tabletop extension was added to the front right portion of the green. The bunker that now wraps
around that daunting pin position is an abyss. The 13th has two gaping bunkers that appear as the
nostrils of an inhospitable beast. At the par-3 16th, with its tee commanding an alluring view of
the river, the original moat-style bunker has been restored, making for a dramatic postcard.

"Adding the fairway bunkering has brought the most to the golf course," says Hanse. "Also,
getting a consistent style of steep grass faces with flat bottoms. The course now has a very
distinct look to it, especially in Westchester County where there are no other Macdonald-Raynor
courses."

Because the work was done gradually, play was never disrupted significantly. A few temporary
tees had to be used, a few drop areas created, but because the greens and fairways weren't being
torn up, play could continue. In the process, members could become acclimated to the joys, and
perils, of their sympathetically restored course.